


home inside me, i find my way back to you

by perseqhones



Category: That '70s Show
Genre: F/M, i love them so much just let them talk like normal people, no beta we die like men, purely self indulgent hehe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27032212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perseqhones/pseuds/perseqhones
Summary: Jackie Burkhart is a chess match that he doesn’t know how to win, even though checkmate is literally right in front of him and his opponent’s basically helping him win.
Relationships: Jackie Burkhart/Steven Hyde
Comments: 22
Kudos: 100





	home inside me, i find my way back to you

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, this is my first fic in like five years, but I've been meaning to write a JH fic for a while and I wrote this in a fit of RAGE because I got so annoyed with Jackie's wounded puppy characterization in some of the fics I've read. Let her berate him for not trusting her and let him sit there and take it, no more repeating history!! Probably a little OOC (I didn't watch seasons 7&8) but like ? the writers wrote them OOC like inconsistently like 70% of the time so whatever. Title is from Here with Me by Susie Suh & Robot Koch. Enjoy!

Oh, man, his fist really aches. He should’ve done some damage to Kelso before he fled the scene, because he _really, desperately_ wants to punch something _right the fuck now_.

What surprises him, though, is that he’s not in his car, foot on the gas, burning rubber all the way to Vegas right _the fuck_ now. No, he’s still here, in the shitty motel room way below Jackie’s standards, after catching his _chick_ with his _best friend_ and huh, maybe this is what Kelso felt when he got back from California.

She’s got her back pressed against the closed door, staring at him with an unflinching glare and it’s, like, so different from the Jackie that’s been around the past few months. That Jackie looked like she gave up a little part of her self. This Jackie just looks mad.

Why should _she_ be mad? _He’s_ the one who caught her with her ex. 

“Jackie, move away from the door,” he tells her with gritted teeth and clenched fists.

“Not until you hear what I have to say,” she says, and it’s like she’s digging her heels into the dirty carpet of this dingy motel room until she’s physically rooted to it, like she’s resting all ninety-five pounds of her weight and sticking herself to the door until her sweat—Jackie Burkhart doesn’t sweat—magically becomes glue.

She’s got some _nerve_.

Feels a lot like the aftermath of the ‘ _get off my boyfriend!’_ fiasco.

“You have to listen to me this time, Steven, this can’t be like last time. No more jumping to conclusions only to regret it later,” she says, shaking her head. “If you walk out of here, you’re gonna be making the same mistake you made before with the nurse. So you have to listen to me this time.”

Dammit.

“ _Why_? You gonna tell me I shouldn’t throw what we’ve got away because _‘you love me_ ’ again?” he taunts, and her eyebrows furrow and she, y’know, kinda looks like she’s gonna cry, but she doesn’t. In fact, her expression changes so fast that it could probably give someone whiplash.

“Actually, that’s _exactly_ what I’m gonna do, Steven, and you’re gonna listen because you _owe_ me, _Steven_ , and don’t even bother saying no because we both know you do, so take a seat, _Steven_ ,” she tells him, and she stares him down until he begrudgingly sits down on the bed because c’mon, _what was he gonna do_? Forcibly move her out of the way? Tell her to shove her explanation up her ass? Call her a whore and a bitch and a cheater and a hypocrite and make her cry even though _how many hours ago was he saying all that crap about becoming ‘Mrs. Jackie Hyde’?_

Yeah, _right_. He’s pissed, but he’s not _that_ pissed.

“That’s _great_ , Jackie, you just do that,” he snaps. He takes a seat on the bed and waits, even though the joint that he packed before he left is burning a hole in his pocket, right next to the ring.

Jackie locks all the locks on the door, knowing it’d make it harder for him leave as fast as possible. He always knew she was a smart girl.

“We didn’t do anything,” she claims, and it’s like, isn’t that what Kelso would tell her before, whenever he was hooking up with his secret flavor of the week behind her back?

“That’s what they all say, isn’t it?”

“You _bonehead_ , let me remind you that _I_ was the one who was _cheated on both times_ ,” she snarks. “Why would I ever want anyone else to suffer the heartbreak that I have? Why would I ever want _you_ to suffer the heartbreak that I have?”

“Give me a taste of my own medicine maybe?” he says, and she rolls her eyes. “Besides, we all knew you’d run back to Kelso eventually.”

She kicks him, smiles at his grunt, and then takes a seat next to him on the bed. “Oh, _please_ , Steven. I wouldn’t touch Michael like that again with a ten foot pole.”

 _“Right_.”

“Besides, you’re the one who told me I deserved better and now I believe it so no takesies backsies.”

 _Well_ , he can’t argue with that logic.

“Okay, Jackie, say I believe you,” he says. “What happened?”

She looks surprised. Like she didn’t think she’d get this far. Like she didn’t think he’d give her the chance to explain, or that he’d give her the benefit of the doubt, and he’s thinking…damn, maybe he did screw something up there.

“He drove me here and I was crying, like, the whole way, Steven, and you know how Michael doesn’t know how to comfort anyone that doesn’t involve him hitting on them,” she huffs, rolling her eyes. She’s kinda shaking, and he hears the tiniest sniffle come out of her. “He got us some sodas, and shook one of them up and then tried to give it to me, but since I’m a total genius, I switched them and it exploded all over him.”

So far, it checks out. He doesn’t say anything. She takes it as a sign to go on.

“He’s so _annoying_. He left to get his own room since I told him he couldn’t stay here and Brooke said her mom didn’t want him anywhere near her house,” Jackie continues, with a tick in her eyebrow like she was getting a headache just from reliving what happened. “The next thing I know, you’re in my room and he’s walking in in only a towel and a bucket of ice for God-knows-what reason. Like, where the hell did he get ‘strip and come hither’ from ‘ _get the hell out of my room_ ’? God, I can’t _believe_ him!”

She groans and falls back onto the bed.

“And I can’t believe _you_ for thinking that I could ever do something like that in the first place—enough is enough, Steven!” she starts up again, and he flinches when her voice pitches. “You’re always pulling this crap, like holding what happened with Annette and Michael over my head even though I never even _mention_ the nurse, like I’m pretty sure what _you_ did was worse, but _I_ loved you enough to forgive and forget!”

“I—“

“Shut up, Steven, I’m talking,” she doesn’t even look apologetic like she did last time, that one day she realized that she was a bossy little brat and that that was definitely a _negative_ trait.

Behind his sunglasses, he rolls his eyes. He’s pretty sure she knows he does anyway.

“I get it. You’re the sad little orphan boy, your parents left you, they didn’t love you as much as they should have, but that’s just…well, that’s just not a justifiable reason for you to project that on _me_! Not when I’ve disproved that to you, time and time again!”

He wonders when she’d gotten so smart.

“Jackie—“

“I said shut your piehole!” she snaps, and he thinks that if she was telling anyone else that, he’d be impressed. Hell, he’s still a little impressed. “I’ve stuck around for two years, bending over backwards to be the _super cute_ _,_ supportive girlfriend who, yeah, really freakin’ wants to get married and can be really pushy and bossy and annoying, fine, _whatever_ , but you can’t tell me that all that pushing didn’t pay off, Steven. Well, you can, but we both know neither of us would believe it.”

He opens his mouth to talk but she hits him with the back of her hand and his mouth shuts again and that’s probably really out of character, but she’s right, he does owe her. Doesn’t mean he’s gotta like her telling him off like that, though.

“And, lastly, you’re mean, you’re paranoid, you’re way too pessimistic—no, Steven, it totally _isn’t_ being realistic, so shut up _. Anyway,_ you have absolutely no taste in music or clothes whatsoever, in fact, you wear the same three things every day, you listen to the same two bands, and you have like, five friends. Also, you’re so emotionally distant that talking to a ghost through a ouija board would probably be easier that talking to you. If I was doing all this for some sick revenge scheme, don’t you think I would’ve done it a while ago? I’m Jackie Burkhart, Steven, and everyone knows I don’t like to waste time.”

Well. She got him there. If he wasn’t impressed before, he sure as hell was now.

She’s breathing heavily. This probably has been eating at her alive for months now. His dumbass just _had_ to light the bomb.

Hyde looks at her. Looks at the dark hair that’s only a little bit messy from her fall onto the bed, looks at the glassy eyes that stare right ahead at the door. She’s still shaking, and it actually doesn’t make him feel good, _none of this_ is making him feel good, and _that’s why he never did relationships before_. Too complicated, too messy.

And yet, here he is.

So he says the only thing that comes to mind. “Okay.”

It’s not quite an admission to her being right, but it’s the sentiment that counts.

His hand reaches into his pocket for the joint that he’d figured he would need, after he proposed, when Jackie’s yapping her mouth off about how she wants white doves and lavenders or whatever at the wedding.

Well, plans usually change with him anyway.

He lights it. He breathes in. He breathes out. The odor drowns out Jackie’s perfume, but he knows her scent like he knows what the sun feels like when it’s raining for days on end, it’s, like, engraved in his sad orphan soul or whatever.

She plucks the joint out of his grasp with dainty fingers and warmth radiating from her skin, and then she takes a long and deep hit, before she falls back onto the bed as she passes it back.

“So, you didn’t even think about sleeping with him?” he asks, and in the corner of his eye, he sees that she’s watching him, eyebrow quirking.

She laughs and it’s like everything’s okay again. She laughs like she did that summer when everything was fresh and new, when she was both unfamiliar and familiar all at once, in that walking into a relationship with her was kinda like walking into a new home.

“I don’t really want to risk catching something, Steven,” she says and her words comes out like a song. “Michael’s a dog.”

He snickers and her eyes close with her mouth stretching into a grin. Her smile is unflinchingly bright, like a goddamn ray of a sunshine, and he’s thinking that he probably wouldn’t last long without it.

Jackie’s happy high doesn’t last very long, because soon after that, everything starts closing in and time slows down until every second feels like an hour and every time she breathes, it feels like she’s gonna vomit.

He’s gone through this before, bad trips. Fez greened out his first time smoking with the group. Eric greened out more times that he can count. Donna and Kelso have, at least once.

So in between learning how to take care of Eric during his bad trips and dealing with Edna’s drunken stupors, he knows what to do. He keeps her talking, he reassures her, he tries to distract her whenever she asks about the time, and when she says she wants to puke, he leads her to the bathroom and holds back her hair.

It startles him when he thinks about this exact scene, ten years from now, only she’s hunched over the toilet in their home, from morning sickness and not from drugs. He shakes himself out of it and runs to get her some water.

When he comes back, she’s passed out against the bathtub, hair in her face and nothing in the toilet bowl.

Hyde carries her back to bed, tucks her in, and places a bucket on the bedside table before making himself comfortable right next to her.

Jackie wakes up a few hours later, a little after two in the morning.

He’s asleep next to her, facing her, sunglasses off. She tangles a hand in his hair and falls back asleep, hoping he’ll still be there in the morning.

He is.

After a nice long shower, Jackie’s back to her normal self. She’s sitting at the desk, in her robe, brushing her hair as he lounge in the bed. It’s been a quiet morning, but Hyde knows they still gotta talk. This can’t be like last time. No more miscommunication and jumping to conclusions.

“I don’t wanna get married, Jackie, not now. I’m not ready,” he says, as she takes a seat next to him, back against the headboard.

“Then why are you here?” she asks, blinking owlishly with her abnormally big eyes, kaleidoscopes in his vision as he looks into them without a darkened barrier.

“I mean, I was gonna say yes, but would you really have wanted to get hitched because of an ultimatum?” he’s hoping she’s getting it. She just looks away, watching the ceiling, counting the cracks.

“Not really,” she murmurs. “I just wanted to know if you can see a future with me, puddin’. I don’t think it was ever about getting married. Just the commitment from it.”

“We’ve been together for so long, we’re basically already married anyway. I call that commitment.”

She hits him lightly with the back of her hand. “It’s been, like, two years, Steven.”

He snorts. “With you, doll, feels like it’s been forever.”

She squints, like she’s contemplating whether or not to take that as a compliment. In the end, she shrugs and then tilts her head to face him again. He looks at her too.

“Can you see us lasting that long?

He flinches. “Jackie.”

She looks away again. And then, like something clicked, she shifts her position so that she’s sitting crisscrossed, completely devoting her attention to him.

“Do you _want_ a future with me?” she asks, changing the wording of her original question a little.

There it is.

So he watches her, watches the way she swallows her breath, the way she stares unwaveringly into his eyes as she patiently waits for his answer, despite not being a patient person at all, and something in him, well, clicks.

Because this question’s easier, because this question isn’t subject to external forces, because this question isn’t hypothetical, because this question involves his own free will.

She’s getting it. He’s also getting it. They’re both finally, at-long-freakin’-last, getting it.

He didn’t even realize one little change would make such a big difference, but she figured it out. That’s his chick, Jackie Burkhart.

So even though Jackie is bitchy and whiny and always needing some form of validation and attention, she can be _sorta_ nice at times, or at least just less bitchy, and she almost always seems to know what to say, and she’s probably the fastest learner he knows, although that’s not a hard thing to say when it comes to their friends. Oh, and _holy shit_ , is she a piece of work, but she’s a _complex_ piece of work and she can be a pretty badass and complex piece of work.

Jackie Burkhart is a chess match that he doesn’t know how to win, even though checkmate is literally _right_ _in front of him_ and his opponent’s basically helping him win.

So, yeah.

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Course I do.”

Turns out, he can’t really see a lot of futures where they’re not together and he’s not miserable. Took him long enough.

She smiles so wide and so bright that no sunrise will ever compare, and she makes his breath hitch in his lungs for a good minute there. She looks so proud, like she realized that she was asking the wrong question the whole time, and he smiles at her, like he’s proud of her too.

So he goes to shower and when he comes out, she’s sitting in the middle of the bed, staring at the closed ring box in front of her. Steam wafts into the room but her focus is centered only on that box.

Must’ve fallen out of his pocket.

“Is it for me?” She asks, looking up at him. Her gaze is always a little careful now, a little unsure, and it kinda hurts, not gonna lie. This is Jackie. She sends herself flowers and writes his name on the card, she dedicates love songs to herself on the radio under his name, and she’s asking if the ring that he brought all the way to Chicago from Point Place, Wisconsin, and is sitting literally right in front of her face is for her. This chick’s crazy.

But he’s gotta be learning something from tonight, because he gets it. She’s giving him a way out, in its most subtlest form.

“Yeah, doll, I got you a ring,” he says, sitting down next to her. “But you’re not getting it today.”

Jackie nods but there’s something deeper, a hint of hurt and sadness, and Hyde hates seeing her sad—that he’s known for a long damn time—so as he pockets it, he throws her a bone.

“One day, though,” she perks right up. “And when that day comes, Jackie, you can’t go yapping your big fat ex-cheerleader mouth to our grandkids about me not proposing the first time around, we clear?”

Her eyes bug out and she looks real happy, so he’s good. That’s good—this is good.

“Oh, Steven,” she says in that Jackie way and she winds her arms around him and pulls him into a kiss and yeah, this is good. She pulls back for just a second. “So we’re still technically pre-engaged, right?”

He opens his eyes, about to ask what the hell is ‘pre-engaged’, but she’s got that teasing smile on her lips and he rolls his eyes, and then kisses her again.

Yeah, he guesses they are. Whatever the hell that means. So far, it’s no worse than bowling.

“In another universe, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stop you from leaving and you would’ve driven all the way to a trashy place like Las Vegas or something.”

He clears his throat. “That did cross my mind.”

She swats at his shoulder. “And then you would’ve married some skanky stripper out of anger and sadness because your poor orphan soul lost its mate but you wouldn’t even remember that until she showed up at the Formans, and you probably would’ve paraded her around in front of me just to hurt me.”

He makes a face as she catches her breath. “Jackie, how much did you smoke?”

She sniffles. “That was my nightmare last night.”

His gaze softens. “I wouldn't do that you, not in my right mind.”

She smiles. Her eyes flutter shut. “Good to know.”

Well, man, it’s now or never.

“I love you.”

She doesn’t even open her eyes. Instant regret.

“I’m not saying it back,” she teases.

Silence. “That’s cool.”

Another beat. One eye opens.

“Oh, Steven. I love you too.”

He grins and pulls her closer.

_fin._


End file.
